so ive been licensed for about 8 months and just got around to actually building something instead of using the whip on my HT. decided to throw up a basic 40m half wave dipole in the backyard, cut it to length using the 468/f formula, ended up with about 33 feet per side. fed it with 50 ohm coax through a SO-239 connector i salvaged off an old rig.

heres where im not sure i did it right — i just twisted the center conductor to one leg and the shield braid to the other, wrapped everything in self-amalgamating tape and called it a day. been using it for a couple weeks and it seems to work, SWR is around 1.8:1 at the bottom of the band which honestly seems fine, but i keep reading about chokes and baluns and now im second guessing myself. do i actually need a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint or is what ive got good enough for general use? not doing contests or anything, just ragchewing and some SSB. the antenna is about 25 feet up inverted-V style with the apex at the top of my fence post and the ends drooping down at maybe 45 degrees.

your swr sounds fine for 40m honestly, inverted-V's tend to run a little higher impedance than a flat dipole but 1.8 at the low end is workable, most tuners and rigs handle that no problem. as for the balun question — technically you dont need one to make contacts, plenty of people run dipoles without any choke and they work. but the reason people push them is to keep RF off the coax shield, without a choke the outside of the coax braid becomes part of the antenna and can cause common mode current issues which leads to RF in the shack, weird SWR readings, sometimes the rig acting up. if youre just ragchewing and not noticing any problems then youre probably okay for now.

that said a simple W2DU style choke or even just winding 8-10 turns of coax into a coil right at the feedpoint costs basically nothing and is worth doing at some point. for 40m you could also wind some coax through a mix 31 toroid if you have one laying around. but dont stress it if everything is working, get on the air and have fun with it first.

yeah im in a similar boat, built my first dipole last spring and went back and forth on the balun thing forever. ended up just making a choke out of like 10 turns of RG-8X on a 4 inch PVC form, cost nothing and i feel better about it. whether it actually made a difference i honestly cant say, but my SWR got a little more stable across the band so something changed. your setup sounds totally reasonable though, 25 feet for 40m is decent especially inverted-V, the lower angle on those legs helps with regional contacts anyway.